In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions “Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp:”
While snubbing gods, including the big G,
Iph borrowed some peripheral debris
From mystic visions; and it offered tips
(The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) -
How not to panic when you're made a ghost:
Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast,
Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,
Or let a person circulate through you.
How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,
Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.
How to keep sane in spiral types of space.
Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad
Plump in the middle of a busy road,
Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,
Or a book mite in a revived divine. (ll. 549-566)
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), “How to locate in blackness, with a gasp, / Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp” is the loveliest couplet in the Canto. An orbicle of jasp brings to mind valuable crystal orbs in H. P. Lovecraft's and Kenneth J. Sterling's story In The Walls of Eryx (1939). The events depicted in the story take place in the future, when humanity has developed space travel and begun to explore Venus. There, they discover valuable crystal orbs that can be used as a source of electrical power, as well as a race of primitive "man-lizards" who guard the crystals fervently and who attack any humans who try to take them. Я (pronounced ya) being the last tetter of the Russian alphabet, ящерица (yashcheritsa, the Russian word for lizard) is one of the last words in the dictionary. The last entry in Kinbote's Index is "Zembla, a distant northern land." In Vera Nabokov's Russian translation of Pale Fire, the last entry in Kinbote's Index is ячейка яшмы (yacheyka yashmy, a cell of jasper).
At the beginning of his poem Shade calls the snow-covered outdoor grounds "that crystal land:"
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land! (ll. 1-12)
In his commentary Kinbote writes:
Line 12: that crystal land
Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country. After this, in the disjointed, halfobliterated draft which I am not at all sure I have deciphered properly:
Ah, I must not forget to say something
That my friend told me of a certain king.
Alas, he would have said a great deal more if a domestic anti-Karlist had not controlled every line he communicated to her! Many a time have I rebuked him in bantering fashion: "You really should promise to use all that wonderful stuff, you bad gray poet, you!" And we would both giggle like boys. But then, after the inspiring evening stroll, we had to part, and grim night lifted the drawbridge between his impregnable fortress and my humble home.
At the end of his commentary Kinbote calls his country "Zembla the Fair:"
We know how firmly, how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt, about the King of Zembla. We have been prepared for the horrible disappointment in store for me. Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme! It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana - but I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described to him, the characters I had made alive for him and all the unique atmosphere of my kingdom. I even suggested to him a good title - the title of the book in me whose pages he was to cut: Solus Rex, instead of which I saw Pale Fire, which meant to me nothing. I started to read the poem. I read faster and faster. I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament. Where were the battlements of my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the Fair? Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained windows, and the Black Rose Paladins, and the whole marvelous tale?
Nothing of it was there! The complex contribution I had been pressing upon him with a hypnotist's patience and a lover's urge was simply not there. Oh, but I cannot express the agony! Instead of the wild glorious romance - what did I have? An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neoPopian prosodic style - beautifully written of course - Shade could not write otherwise than beautifully - but void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it and make it transcend its time. (note to Line 1000)
Describing his rented house, Kinbote mentions the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero:
Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton’s old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.’s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names garbled by early settlers in such a way as to accommodate specious derivations and commonplace allusions). On the northern side of the hill Dulwich Road joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words partly because all kinds of descriptive booklets should be available to the reader by writing to the University's Publicity Office, but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences. (note to Lines 47-48)
The poet's daughter, Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega. Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Ozero is the Russian word for "lake." The three lakes in Pale Fire bring to mind Onyx, Eryx and Climax, the three lakes near Camp Q in VN's novel Lolita (1955):
She told me the way she had been debauched. We ate flavorless mealy bananas, bruised peaches and very palatable potato chips, and die Kleine told me everything. Her voluble but disjointed account was accompanied by many a droll moue. As I think I have already observed, I especially remember one wry face on an “ugh!” basis: jelly-mouth distended sideways and eyes rolled up in a routine blend of comic disgust, resignation and tolerance for young frailty.
Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a “very select” one as she put it. That tent-mate (“quite a derelict character,” “half-crazy,” but a “swell kid”) instructed her in various manipulations. At first, loyal Lo refused to tell me her name.
“Was it Grace Angel?” I asked.
She shook her head. No, it wasn’t it was the daughter of a big shot. He -
“Was it perhaps Rose Carmine?”
“No, of course not. Her father - ”
“Was it, then, Agnes Sheridan perchance?”
She swallowed and shook her head - and then did a double take.
“Say, how come you know all those kids?”
I explained.
“Well,” she said. “They are pretty bad, some of that school bunch, but not that bad. If you have to know, her name was Elizabeth Talbot, she goes now to a swanky private school, her father is an executive.”
I recalled with a funny pang the frequency with which poor Charlotte used to introduce into party chat such elegant tidbits as “when my daughter was out hiking last year with the Talbot girl.”
I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions?
“Gosh no,” exhaled limp Lo mimicking dread and relief, pressing a falsely fluttering hand to her chest.
I was more interested, however, in heterosexual experience. She had entered the sixth grade at eleven, soon after moving to Ramsdale from the Middle West. What did she mean by “pretty bad”?
Well, the Miranda twins had shared the same bed for years, and Donald Scott, who was the dumbest boy in the school, had done it with Hazel Smith in his uncle’s garage, and Kenneth Knight - who was the brightest - used to exhibit himself wherever and whenever he had a chance, and -
“Let us switch to Camp Q,” I said. And presently I got the whole story.
Barbara Burke, a sturdy blond, two years older than Lo and by far the camp’s best swimmer, had a very special canoe which she shared with Lo “because I was the only other girl who could make Willow Island” (some swimming test, I imagine). Through July, every morning - mark, reader, every blessed morning - Barbara and Lo would be helped to carry the boat to Onyx or Eryx (two small lakes in the wood) by Charlie Holmes, the camp mistress’ son, aged thirteen - and the only human male for a couple of miles around (excepting an old meek stone-deaf handyman, and a farmer in an old Ford who sometimes sold the campers eggs as farmers will); every morning, oh my reader, the three children would take a short cut through the beautiful innocent forest brimming with all the emblems of youth, dew, birdsongs, and at one point, among the luxuriant undergrowth, Lo would be left as sentinel, while Barbara and the boy copulated behind a bush.
At first, Lo had refused “to try what it was like,” but curiosity and camaraderie prevailed, and soon she and Barbara were doing it by turns with the silent, coarse and surly but indefatigable Charlie, who had as much sex appeal as a raw carrot but sported a fascinating collection of contraceptives which he used to fish out of a third nearby lake, a considerably larger and more populous one, called Lake Climax, after the booming young factory town of that name. Although conceding it was “sort of fun” and “fine for the complexion,” Lolita, I am glad to say, held Charlie’s mind and manners in the greatest contempt. Nor had her temperament been roused by that filthy fiend. In fact, I think he had rather stunned it, despite the “fun.” (1.32)
The narrator and main character in Lolita, Humbert Humbert is tempted to drown his wife Charlotte (Lolita's mother) in Hourglass Lake, a woodlake near Ramsdale.